Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms' exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel...

Does granting birthright citizenship help immigrant children integrating in the host country's educational system? We address this question using a reform of the German naturalization law in 1999 that entitled children born after January 1, 2000 with birthright citizenship. We use a...

Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities exploiting 6,800 tax changes for identification. Using event study designs and differences-in-differences models, we find that workers bear about half of the total tax burden....

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

Immigrant children often face educational disadvantages that stem from their parents' decision-making. For example, in many immigrant-receiving countries, immigrants are less likely than the native-born to enroll their children in preschool programs or enable them access to higher education....

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...